> I took the metro as far as I could go, which is about half-way,
> and a bus from there. The center of Bucha all told is about 30km
> from the center of Kyiv.
An aspect of the Ukraine war I'm still having trouble wrapping my mind around is how close (geographically) everything is. I thought of Kyiv along the lines of London during the Blitz -- in danger, but not necessarily on the front lines -- and of Bucha as perhaps a town along the road from Russian territory.
But in truth it's more like a suburb. The distance from Bucha's rail station to the Office of the President of Ukraine is about the same as San Francisco to Millbrae.
It puts into perspective how fraught the early days of the invasion were, and the true weight of Zelensky holding his ground in Kyiv.
Hostomel/Antonov airport is really quite close to the center of Kiev. The russians made a real effort to capture it in the beginning days of the war as an airlift beachhead, (resulting in a huge fatality rate for their paratroopers), and their relief convoy getting nearly obliterated.
And yet, the factual outcome of the battle (many months ago!) was that all of the russian army units to the north/northwest of Kiev were either destroyed/killed, captured or withdrew themselves back into Belarus. Unless you want to claim that the Ukrainians did not actually win in that entire theatre of the war?
That massive convoy of Russian vehicles to the north of Kiev in the early days of the war is not presently parked in downtown Kiev, occupying the seats of power, so I think the outcome has been obvious.
You don't want to believe the ukrainians? Okay, the satellite imagery of that massive build up of Russians who tried a thrust directly towards Kiev at the earliest days of the war was taken by Maxar, a US company, and two or three other competing commercial satellite imagery companies.
Your entire comment reads like somebody who thinks RT/Sputnik is real journalism.
> their own Ombudsman for Human Rights admitted that she made up claims about Russian soldiers raping children
Not having heard about this, I looked it up.
She was fired by Ukraine lawmakers, specifically (among other things) for publishing reports without factual basis. Ukrainian journalists published an open letter criticizing her reports as lacking sufficient evidence.
Not exactly. Also she actually had an interview in which she admitted that she exaggerated to sway Italy's five star party because they were against sending arms. I can try to find the interview, but it doesn't seem like anyone on HN actually thinks questioning things that come out the people that lied about the Iraq war is worthwile. but below is an actual investigation that isn't quite as rosy.
Exactly, and of course Kyiv/Bucha was close to the early fighting - Russia made a thunder run directly to it from the nearby border. Russia started their invasion a 2 hr drive from Kyiv, with no resistance they could have occupied it in hours. Instead they managed to create a military traffic jam the entire length of the highway trying to force the issue.
Nowadays, Kyiv is a 8 or 9 hr drive from the major fights, like going from New York City past Philadelphia past Baltimore past DC past Richmond and all the way to Raleigh, NC.
There was a great WSJ piece about this recently [1]. It's a mistake to frame it as a passive mistake by Russia — there was some truly incredible spontaneous thinking and heroism on Ukraine's part that turned it into a traffic jam / deathtrap.
In a slightly different world, if a couple dozen people had been less committed to stopping the blitz, it could have ended very differently.
Yes, the Ukrainian military had to blow up the dam in the northern suburbs of Kyiv, the city of Vyshgorod [source: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/06/1121201310/ukraine-flooded-vi...] That way, they safeguarded the area from Russian mechanical advancement. But some Russian hot heads still managed to get into the city and rode their tanks in the northern borough of Kyiv — Obolon.
I heard that a special unit was traveling on quad bikes through the swamps next to the column to harass the column in various ways and ensure supplies never reached the front of the column.
My impression as a layman is that Ukraine has been fighting this war with a lot of creativity and innovation, surgical precision and excellent coordination. Unlike Russia, which tried to be fast and clever but failed at it, and has since relied on just massive firepower to destroy everything in their path.
“Destroyed everything in their path?” War would be over if that had been their strategy. Did the recent mobilization not teach you anything at all? Putin has been fighting with the gloves on, if not one hand tied behind his back. The “surgical precision” you get fed in the media is also a direct function of close coordination with the US war machine, which starves the American people of even potable water as it spends more than the next several largest countries combined.
lol, the recent mobilization taught us that Russia has chewed through its entire supply of trained and armed soldiers, and is now desperately conscripting unwilling old men.
It's not going to change anything. I hope you figure out sooner rather than later that you're living in an information bubble that will inevitably pop.
At least I'm not living in the information bubble where it makes sense for Russia to blow up its own pipeline and shell the nuclear facility that it is occupying ;-)
Or if Putin had taken the gloves off earlier (as many nationalists to the right of him had been demanding) it would have ended very differently as well.
Both things happened, the first Russian general was killed by UA SoF sniper when he went to the front of stuck column to try and deal with the traffic jam. They could not have occupied Kyiv in hours though cause closer Kyiv their columns were getting decimated by UA artillery.
A good deal of the American Civil War was fought within what are now suburbs or exurbs of Washington, DC. Meet a Virginia Railroad Express (VRE) train at L'Enfant Plaza, and you will likely find some commuters from Fredericksburg, to say nothing of Manassas.
The Russians were also attacking from other directions, resulting in Kyiv being partly surrounded for quite some time.
And as close the Russians got, the fog of war made it seem like they were even closer. One the night of February 25th - one day into the war - the New York Times had the headline: "RUSSIAN TROOPS ENTER KYIV"[1].
Bucha is only one of the suburbs of Kyiv suffered. Kharkiv region, Izuym, Mariupol, is much much worse. God knows what else will be found after liberation of other parts.
It's really shocking to see how people are easily manipulated. Half of the russia thinks that they are at full fledge war with US, EU and rest of west. Simple logic check like ok... their army is here, but have you heard of Western Rockets, F-35's , Tanks. Nope. Still we are under atack
This Russian guy on RT doesn't seem very manipulated, more:
>on RT's show "Beautiful Russia," propagandist argues that Russia shouldn't worry about the way events like Bucha are being perceived or covered in the West. Instead, he says, Russia should lay into that: "Yes, that's how we are... We'll show you even more. Fear us!"
Younger more educated people are more immune ( although equally passive and "stoic" ) but the vast majority believes what Kremlin says ( with varying degrees ).
But it's not "magic", with 20+ years of constant propaganda in pretty much every TV channel every population would believe the same. Do not underestimate the sophistication and the level they can shape the minds of their people. The Internet was a new "challenge" but it's mostly under their control although not at the level they control TV and every newspaper.
Also, the "story/reality" they spread in Africa, most Asia and South America is completely is completely different to the one they spread on the West. China does something similar.
To my knowledge in the West their low effort blatant lies doesn't get much traction, but the way they feed the disenfranchised, contrarians and "influencers" fostering discontent has been effective. Don't know about TikTok.
I have a hard time believing, people believe they are at full war with the NATO, yet at the same time are not allowed to call it war. There is only so much vodka you can drink.
It just always amuses me what the same people who cry about a war which isn't called a war completely ignore previous eight years when it was called a war everywhere... except officially it was ATO.
It used to be that Russian media, as well as most Russians interviewed by foreign media, gave the impression that most Russians supported the war. Since the mobilisation, the hundreds of thousands of Russians trying to flee the country tell a very different and probably much more accurate story of how many people in Russia really support the war.
This is only a partially correct take. There is a huge difference between supporting a war from your couch and doing the same in the trenches. Most of those who run _now_ are running from the latter. They were quite comfortable in the former role.
It tells us nothing, really. Hundreds of thousands is <1%
It might only surprise people, who can't quite wrap their heads around the fact that other people are individuals with their own opinions, regardless of geography.
Hundreds of thousands is a lot. It's more than the number of Russian soldiers currently fighting in Ukraine. And there are the young men most likely to be drafted.
It might feel a lot, but is still such a small fraction. Comparing it with Russian force in Ukraine is hardly a compliment to it's size, IMO.
I just don't really understand why would one assume that such near-to-margin-of-error numbers could be indicative of anything other than an obvious fact that Russia isn't 100% homogenous (duh!).
I don't understand the relevance of this. The claim is about what "half of Russia thinks". Why would propaganda in Africa have a strong effect on the thought of those in Russia?
Well if Ukraine did not have the American made weapons, they would have folded in less than a month. The United States has spent close to 100B in aid for Ukraine in the last 6 months and other amounts of money by the EU as aid. All told it is about 5-10x Russia’s yearly military budget.
All in all, Russia is a very weak country with less than 1.5T GDP. As a result, any infusion of huge sum on money by external actors will tilt the balance in the favor of the party that gets the money .
Exactly. The reason it's worth it to send those weapons, is because Ukrainians themselves are so eager to fight for their country. That is the massive difference between Ukraine on one hand, and Afghanistan and Iraq on the other; Ukrainians know exactly what they're fighting for, and what they're fighting against. I don't think it's possible to break their fighting spirit.
All that spin about NATO fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian is wrong. It's the Ukrainians themselves who want to fight for their country, with or without outside help. The outside help just makes it easier, but they would have fought either way.
Why imply that Ukrainians motivation somehow excludes NATO from the equation?
NATO provides intelligence, training, counsel and supplies. You can't just pretend it's not involved and that at some point this war didn't become Russia's proxy war with NATO.
Russia may see it as a proxy war, but Ukrainians don't. To them, it's entirely about the future and freedom of Ukraine.
You've got to understand that while the current generation of Ukrainians grew up in relative freedom, their parents and grandparents grew up in the Soviet Union. And now with Putin trying to subjugate Ukraine, they fear that their children may grow up in a similar situation, and possibly worse, with all the Russian talk of genocide.
So that's why they're fighting so hard. They're fighting for their lives, their freedom, and that of their children and grandchildren. That's an incredibly powerful motivator, and I'm absolutely convinced that they'd fight just as hard without foreign support. But that support does give them a better fighting chance, enabling them to fight Russia on equal footing, instead of relying mostly on partisan/guerilla warfare, which is actually what NATO expected to happen.
With or without support, I don't think this is a war that Russia could possibly win; there's just too much at stake for Ukraine, and not enough for Russia. People are generally eager to fight for their own lives and freedom, but not to subjugate others. Especially not a brother nation, as Ukrainians and Russians used to see each other before this.
I don't deny that it's rare, but this is a pretty clear and blatant case of it.
That the people of China don't fight for freedom like this is a completely different issue, though maybe not as different as the reason Russian don't. For Ukraine, the situation is quite different, though: they have tasted freedom for 30 years, and there's a clear external party who undeniably wants to take it away from them. Can't get much clearer than that.
It's only that clear and blatant, when you cozily watch it on TV. A nice captivating narrative with clear morals, "good", "bad" and all the other storybook stuff that literally never happens in real life.
I'm sorry, but I just feel like your impressions of it are naive, as you reason in categories that don't have weight for real actual individuals in real actual life.
"Fighting for freedom after tasting it for 30 years" is something that only exists in storybooks. In reality it's always powerful people making the decisions and then agitating other people into submission.
Real individuals are preoccupied with much more mundane things, like providing for their families and so on.
Ukrainians, Russians, Chinese, whatever. Denying them this is a very typical dehumanization and manipulation tactics, commonly found in western supremacist culture, i.e. "why don't they fight for freedom" tropes.
I suggest you read and watch a bit more about how Ukrainians themselves feel about this situation. Their fighting spirit is higher than I've ever seen in a war. And it makes total sense if you think about why.
Yes, powerful people make the decisions, but those decisions are meaningless if nobody obeys them. You see that in Russia without hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country in order to avoid conscription. They have no faith whatsoever in Putin's war, and don't want to fight in it. Ukraine, on the other hand, doesn't just have much of its own population willing to do what they can, they also have many foreign volunteers who believe sufficiently in their cause to help them. That is not something that happens when the decision only comes from the top. This is a massive difference between Russia and Ukraine, and it's visible in the vastly different morale of the soldiers on the ground.
> Real individuals are preoccupied with much more mundane things, like providing for their families and so on.
Yes, but how are you going to do that when your country is being invaded by someone who wants you dead? This is exactly why Ukrainians are so eager to fight and Russians are not: the effect the war has on them personally.
it's silly to compare Ukraine with Afghanistan. Ukraine was an important part of USSR. so they were once the nr. 2 super power in the world. morale helps but it's far from the deciding factor. they were preparing for some time, it's easier to defend, they get huge help from tens of countries. Russia went it too weak. they assembled a force equal in size to Ukraine but you need much more if you're the attacker.
"In total, the United States has now committed approximately $16.9 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since January 2021. Since 2014, the United States has committed approximately $19 billion in security assistance to Ukraine more than $16.2 billion since the beginning of Russia’s unprovoked and brutal invasion on February 24."
I'm not sure that all of the money/material has yet reached Ukraine. But that is what is said to be committed.
Most of the weapons given to Ukraine have been lost and unaccounted for.
CBS published this report on the missing weapons stolen by corrupt groups operating within Ukraine. Shortly afterwards they were forced to amend a statement that someone is trying to track the newer shipments, without explaining any sort of actual plan for accountability.
This story was retracted by CBS because it turned out to be hugely misleading and is no where near the truth about the situation today. Trying to pass it off as such is at best misleading and at worst actively malicious.
But even going down that path of thinking, it’s amazing Ukraine has decimated the Russian armed forces with only a fraction of the weapons they were supplied with!. /s.
I’m motivated to refute Russian propaganda. Something you seem motivated to spread. The quote was the only part that talked any solid numbers about aid to Ukraine, so how can you even make and analysis.
You also never mentioned the quote is from the very start of the war and how the situation of supplies is very different now.
CBS is America, not Russian? The history of Ukrainian political corruption predates the war from Russia.
Russia is a corrupt aggressor, but that does not mean Ukrainian abuses should be ignored. Zelensky is not allowing Ukrainian citizens the freedom to leave the country for safety.
> CBS is America, not Russian? The history of Ukrainian political corruption predates the war from Russia.
CBS is American but this idea that the majority of weapons aren’t being in Ukraine cause they are being sold or stolen or lost _is propaganda_. Nothing supports this idea for the current phase of the war and people have generally moved on from this narrative.
What does limiting who can leave the country during war time have to do with corruption? The narrative of Ukraine loosing most western weapons was started by Russia and then they dropped it since UA advance was clearly showing them to be total BS.
Zelensky gets more money the longer the war drags on. If Ukrainians are allowed freedom to exit to safety, then Zelensky and the oligarchs will not reep as much donations.
You have added some useful links to this discussion but this is the second time you’ve undermined your own argument by laughing at the person you’re responding to. Please be aware of the Hacker News Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Note how the Interpol chief used the future tense.
Why did he talk about the future with such certainty?
It would be unthinkable that he was "influence" to make such claims for a certain purpose.
Also important to remember a portion of funds is being allocated to "trade up" soviet equipment in NATO countries to modern US variants. E.g. US gives modern US tanks to say Poland and Poland gives soviet tanks to Ukraine. Also some equipment has limited shelf life so if not used it would have being replaced in the next few years anyway.
I was not expecting a strong response to the post; I took no steps to handle additional traffic.
Experience is the key to performance, and this is the first time I've posted a noticable thread.
I've upped the number of Apache servers to four and increased the thread count per server to 32. Too late now, of course; but I'll know better in the unlikely event I should come again to post something of interest.
I have rewritten the blog, moving to an index-based layout, rather than the original single-page layout.
I've also moved the CSS link inline. There is no javascript, there are no cookies.
This has broken the link for this story. I added a redirect, but it does nothing. No errors, no logging, just... doesn't do anything. That's an experience I have to say I have had before, with Apache =-)
I've added a couple of words of explanation to the top of the index, and a link there to the blog post.
try using cloudflare, it's free and looks like is suitable for your needs. Also, for static websites, you can try using github pages/cloudflare pages- free hosting for static websites
I wouldn't want AWS to catch any flak because of me, well, not unless I'm writing about Redshift, in which case they get all flak that's appropriate :-)
AWS have nothing to do with this site, and certainly nothing to do with its hosting.
My engineer friend, with whom we develop the first phones on the 8051 processor in the 90s, left Bucha a few hours before the Russian invasion. In fact, russian governmet destroyed the Ukrainians at the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union. More than 50 programmers suffered. We asked for help for many years, but the russian government made Ukraine an outsider and this buried a lot of projects that could have been successful like WhatsApp the founder is from Ukraine.
Unfortunately, russian government look at Ukrainians as slaves for all 30 years of Ukrainian independence. Thank you for your visit and support
At the moment there are 3 posts in HN home page by "green names". Nothing strange IMHO as I've never seen any indication that post ranking is affected by age of poster account.
It's actually a new, second account. I posted for post of a year, then had the original account deleted. I strayed too much from being on-topic (that topic being Redshift).
This blog post was scrubbed from the internet shortly after.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...
"Reddit has removed their blog post identifying Eglin Air Force Base as the most reddit-addicted "city" - Eglin is often cited as the source of some government social-media propaganda/astroturfing programs"
Also note the same themed posts on reddit from accounts that are around 1-2 years old and have 4-5 random posts in last one year but are suddenly active posting about the war.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free"
It seems to me that lots of things get upvotes from people who just want to discuss it and don't click to actually read it. In particular, I wonder how many things in the 'new' page actually get read before being upvoted -- links are usually on the first page of 'new' for only 15 minutes or something like that. It would be interesting to see the composition of the front page if people instead had to click first before being able to upvote.
I know this isn't the topic, since this blogpost is about something else, but the redshift reverse engineering section of the site is excellent.
Reading the whitepapers, you can see the author is really knowledgable about redshift and also hates it with a passion as only someone who spend years fixing it would have :)
Max was (maybe still is, I haven’t been there in a while) quite active in the dbt slack in the redshift channel. He helped me immensely. He really, really, really knows his stuff.
I have to say, I think for all of us if we devote all our time to one particular and extra-ordinarily narrow field we may well come know more than others in that field, it always remains the case that the difference between what we know and what there is to know, remains enourmous.
Putin is expected to formally annex four Ukrainian regions, following sham elections.
From the outset Russia's war of aggression sets it outside its obligations under the UN Charter, the Budapest memorandum, and Geneva Convention. But once annexation is announced by Russia, the rest of the world has to decide what to do about a violation of the most central proscription in all of international law.
I'm skeptical the UN system avoids defacto collapse if it refuses to strangle the Russian regime at this point. And if the UN system ends, whether 5 months or 50 years, I uave serious doubts about WW3 being avoidable. The UN system stinks. But it's all we have, born from the ashes of WW1 and 2, to avoid it. Since we haven't done the hard work of getting rid of nukes, I'm also skeptical humanity avoids using at least one.
China and India need to show up and defend the Charter. They agreed to be bound by this obligation.
> the rest of the world has to decide what to do about a violation of the most central proscription in all of international law.
Morocco annexed Western Sahara, and while most of the world still considers that illegal, the United States has been pretty open about supporting Morocco's control over the area, and Morocco enjoys good international relations otherwise.
I think the highest value of the UN is in the security council. It's a forum for the nuclear powers to talk to each other. Everything else is secondary. If it's enough to avoid WW3, I don't know, but it's all we have.
This has always been my opinion: by definition the UN can't really have enforcement power...but a huge problem in international politics is that you have to actually have protocols and procedures by which the various world powers can communicate with each other at the correct levels of government.
It's the physical action problem: when a government makes policy, how does that go from words to actions? In the international relations business it's the same issue: the prime minister or president or whoever wants to communicate a message reliably to other nations - but who exactly do they talk to do it? (this problem was why the hotline system between the US and Russia was setup after the Cuban missile crisis - a major issue driving the decision making was 6 to 12 hour communication delays trying to go through embassies and hoping messages were being accurately sent).
Even the Security Council has limited usefulness in a confrontation like this, because decisions are so politicized. The case of Bucha is a great example. When reports of atrocities first came out, it was Russia who requested the UN to launch a commission of inquiry into Bucha, and it was the UK, who held the presidency of the Security Council at the time, that blocked it. This was reported in Ukrainian news. (https://frontnews.eu/en/news/details/25750)
What? North Korea, india, Pakistan are not on the security council, and most mitigation of nuclear war probably happens via things that are less public (red phones). Hell. The US and Russia even collaborate - to this day - on a space station, that's independent of and does more for preventing nuclear war than the UN security council
You just moved the goalposts and did not address the point I made, which is that the bulk of security council work is not discussing nuclear issues, and that the powers with nukes have other ways of talking to each other.
Okay, let’s put it this way. The security council is a way to lessen the risk that the most powerful countries destroy the world. I think this is the most important piece of the UN. This is my opinion.
This is mostly for internal consumption. All legal question aside in say Zaporizhzhia region the russian occupied area has less than 200K people while the whole region has 1.7 mil. There are no optics you can put on this to make it look even remotely meaningful.
They're sham elections because any election being held by an occupying force about wanting to join the occupying force cannot be shown to be without coercion, even with international observers. Especially after the discoveries from Bucha, Izium and other places.
On top of that, there's the fact that large portions of the residents were forced out by the war, especially the residents inclined towards Ukraine. So the fact that they don't get a say also makes these elections a joke.
International observers recognized this, thus they refused to oversee the elections. It's a pretty shrewd move to request international observers, since if they had accepted they would've appeared to be giving Russia legitimacy (regardless of what they said) and by refusing they've given Russia the ability to claim to useful idiots that they were trying to act in good faith by asking for international oversight but the West was acting in bad faith.
"large portions of the residents were forced out by the war, especially the residents inclined towards Ukraine"
This is the first sensible answer to a question I asked elsewhere (only to be down-voted for asking a question) about why the insistence on the referendums being a sham. Much of the Ukraine-inclined population fled. Much of the Russia-inclined remained. So the post-invasion vote is heavily pro-Russian.
While the explanation is relevant to this recent election, it doesn't apply to the earlier referendums which have all been denounced as illegitimate by Kyiv and the West. The first (but not only) referendums for independence from Kyiv were in 1991 in Crimea and 2014 in Donbas.
with regards to 1991 referendum in crimea, i pretty sure that according to local laws it was kind of unlawful. same applies to 2014 (in which you don't even know what was the turnout and people who were against were disappearing to be found dead later).
you can kinda say that crimea 1991 referendum maybe had a chance on been kinda legal because it was autonomous republic inside Ukraine, but what happens in Donbas is similar to this https://ktla.com/news/nexstar-media-wire/nationworld/more-or... . You just need to add an armored company from Idaho taking over counties/sheriff department and then holding a votes to see absurdity of the situation
Politics in eastern Ukraine was messy even before the breakup of the USSR, and nobody was an objective observer, so take everything with a grain of salt.
20 January 1991: Crimea 93.6% to join Russia
16 March 2014: Crimea 96.77% for independence
May 2014: Donetsk 89% for autonomy
May 2014: Lugansk 96% for autonomy
I pulled these numbers from a new book[1], which is in French, but there is already a rough English translation floating around. It is well footnoted with URLs.
Jacques Baud who wrote that book which you used for the numbers has a history of pushing pro kremlin points and has been on Russian state TV in the past. I wouldn’t consider him reliable on this topic.
If you want to read a good article on Jacques baud the following is a good analysis.
Baud didn't invent those numbers I quoted. I could have cited a different book, but this was at hand.
I'm well aware of Baud's writings and his military career. I do have issues with his intellectual honesty, but I think he is in no sense a mouthpiece of Moscow. His driving motivation seems to be not pro-Russia, but anti-USA, which is not so unusual for a Frenchman (Swiss). That article you linked is itself rather dishonest, raising issues and then sidestepping Baud's version of the story.
The reason you haven't got a good answer is quite frankly this question doesn't actually deserve an answer. If you were my friend asking it would be sufficient alone for me to stop speaking to you. My visceral reaction is to suppose it is inherently insincere. It's like when someone asks if the holocaust actually happened. Then I remember that even late in the game not everyone has been following the news and thus I will answer it more completely.
Years ago Russian began supplying guns tanks and soldiers to local thugs on the idea that if they betrayed their own countrymen they could have their own Russia supported fiefdom in their part of Ukraine. About 8 years were spent with the region as an active war zone with those who were opposed to the idea fleeing to regions that were not then besieged.
As the full scale invasion began the Russians began purging wrong thinking folks setting up filtration aka concentration camps to torture and murder those deemed disloyal or to be possessed of actionable intel.
So the people that outright shot your 2 of your 5 brothers, tortured the rest, raped your sister and mother show up at your door with guns and tell you that you really ought to vote to join Russia. Meanwhile your brothers with bullets in their heads don't get to vote nor do the 17 members of your extended family that were smart enough to flee and you fear that if you vote the wrong way if they don't outright shoot you right now they might hold it against your cousin who is still in a Russian concentration camp and start cutting on him some more.
Meanwhile if you and all your countrymen stand up and vote against the fourth reich the Russian government is still free to report whatever results they please.
- only 2 of those regions broke away in 2014 and not 4
- more than half of the population run away either in 2014 of this year
- one of those regions only 1/3 to 1/2 under control of russia but they claim sovereignty over entire regions
- 2 of those regions were captured by russia 6 months ago
- voter participation is extremely low. For example I saw numbers that in Kherson region voted 34k people out of 1m population (most probably run away)
- same happened in Zaporizhzhia. More than half of population of Zaporizhzhia region is located in Zaporizhzhia and it's suburbs that are under ukrainian control
- because there are plenty of videos showing empty ballots been counted by person that doesn't even look at them as they take them out of the box
- military personal walking around with "referendum committee" and bunch of reports that people that voted "no" had their documents taken away and those ballots thrown away.
Clearly you have zero exposure or familiarity with people or the area or the current circumstances.
Do you think that Ukrainians, having been exposed to the direct torture, rape, looting, wanton destruction of property, and various other war crimes, are blaming Ukraine for this?!
Even the most brain washed by Russian propaganda eventually have their eyes opened by the reality of occupation.
At no time prior to the illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2014 did Russian speaking regions in Ukraine express any interesting in becoming part of Ukraine. Russia paid mercenaries to infiltrate Ukrainian regions and make it look like there was a dispute. Of course these Russian mercenaries committed the atrocities Russia blames on Ukraine. There is nothing trustworthy about Russia. They've torn up all prior agreements just for border expansion and subjugation. Long term peace in the world isn't going to happen without decolonizing Russia.
If Mexico held a referendum to annex Texas, and 99% of Texans voted to join Mexico—some willingly, some because a guy with an AR-15 was holding the ballot box—I doubt the US government would shrug and say "oh well, it's the will of the people..."
I’ve wondered how many of those Americans who think we should just concede half of Ukraine to Russia would feel the same if Mexico invaded to reclaim the western half of the U.S., raping and murdering their way across the countryside.
I do not support pointing a gun at anyone who is voting but can we please actually have a vote about ejecting texas and then building that wall they want just on you know our side of that border.
Whether or not an occupying power could in theory hold a legitimate referendum on the occupied portion of the country switching sides is a question that doesn't need to be addressed because that didn't even come close to happening.
Taiwan's government the Republic of China has run its island for longer than the People's Republic of China has even existed. At the inception of the PRC it supplanted the ROC as the rulers of mainland China and pushed the ROC back to Taiwan.
Election in Taiwan are conducted by the world acknowledged government of Taiwan according to the wishes of the government and its people, which has been in continuous operation for 110 years.
The fact that China asserts that its conquest of mainland China ought to have also given them Taiwan is irrelevant because it is counterfactual. They failed and this failure created the sovereign nation of Taiwan something that virtually everyone including China knows is an actual thing.
Meanwhile in Ukraine there was never a lawful right for a bunch of thugs to declare independence from their parent country and the offensive launched to create such is rapidly falling apart.
I may be wrong, but I think it depends why you go.
I felt I had to go, and it is specifically a feeling, inside me. I've been trying to pin down exactly what it is, and I'm not sure I've succeeded.
It's something like where something so awful happened here, to ordinary people, the horror, the terror, the violence and death, it feels encumbent to - and grimly - witness what happened.
There is actually a technical component to the Bucha story, as there seems to be controversy over the satellite imagery. On April 4, the NYT published a satellite photo of Bucha dated March 11.[1] However, a Russian OSINT group claims the photo dates April 1.[2]
Machine translation:
Thanks to the help of our team of OSINT and GEOINT specialists, it was possible to determine the time of the image for certain.
- A picture from the NYT allegedly from March 19 shows sand alluviums after a downpour that went from the 31st to the first.
- The attached comparison from the NYT is based on two images that have identical shadow positions. They allegedly compared March 19 and February 28. In fact, they compared February 28 and April 1 - the time and position of the shadows coincide. The original dates of the pictures are American time.
- The Maxar website provides information on which satellites have been surveying the Bucha region over the past period. A total of three satellites were involved.
- By checking the angle of inclination of the Sun above the horizon, the SunCalc program was able to find out by searching the exact time of the image and the direction of the shadows.
- The picture was taken on April 1 at 11:57 GMT (14:57 local summer time).
If by "controversy" you mean disinformation techniques designed to cast doubt on credible reports of war crimes, you are correct. See [1] for an analysis of this claim, including tracing it back to WarOnFakes and denials by Peskov. One of the great things about that report (making it I think particularly suitable for a Hacker News audience) is that it invites skeptical or critical readers to check the evidence themselves. Likely there is a reader of this thread who is competent at analyzing satellite imagery metadata and figuring out shadow angles.
Dispassionate technical analysis is where I'm trying to turn the focus, getting away from the reliance on emotional and ad hominem rhetoric in these threads.
That's interesting, I hope to study it deeper one day.
Do you have similar info about the Kramatorsk train station attack by Tochka-U?
I saw explanations that, relatively convincingly imho, attribute the launch to Urkainian forces.
Namely, if one draws a line through the the place where the rocket part fallen and where the warhead exploded, that line points to Ukrainan positions (to Dobropillia).
In addition, Conflict Intelligence Team (an anti-Putin open source investigation group), analyzed the situation based on the orientation of the rocket part itself, as it layed on the ground. Their report: https://t.me/CITeam/2463. According to them, the rocket part can at most change orientation by 45 degrees. So they draw a sector +-45° from the rocket part direction as it lays on the ground, and only on a far side of this sector they find Russian positions (see the map in the report). Given the probabilistic nature of this process, I think the further away from the actual direction of the rocker part (which points almost directly to Dobropillia on the map), the less likely this is the source of the launch. In other words, the Russian positions are in an "unlikely" part of the sector.
Anyways, using two points - the rocker part location and the explosion point - seems to be the strongest argument. (I haven't geolocated the photos myself yet, but those reports claim the line points towards Dobropillia).
Thanks, I will read it. (This question seems addressed starting with phrase: "Information shared on pro-Russian Telegram channels, meanwhile, compared the area where the missile’s missile body landed with the general impact zone of the cluster munitions.")
Without nit picking too much, one side has a dictator for life type rolling tanks into their peaceful neighbours, running torture chambers, butchering thousands of civilians, doing mass deportations etc. and the other is mostly peaceful run by a Jewish former comedian elected democratically. Which of those sounds more like the old Hitler Nazis?
I don't think details like - oh they changed some street name, really changes that.
> Here's Biletsky (the founder) in March saying Azov had at least 40,000 fighters
"Having started as a militia of just over 300 troops, “there are (now) scores of thousands” of Azov fighters, said Biletsky, who in 2008 co-founded the Social-National Assembly, a grouping of the most extreme nationalist Ukrainian political parties. Most are fighting within Ukraine’s territorial defence units, including more than 1,000 in Kharkiv, he said. The interior ministry did not comment on the figures."
Have you confused "scores of thousands" with 40,000? Or are you just blatantly lying hoping people won't go beyond the paywall?
I can buy that most of it's members were far-right when it was founded.
But labelling all their members as nazis years after it was incorporated into regular military is a shameless manipulation.
> A democratic country that shells its own civilians for 7 years and allows neonazi groups in its military?
There’s Neo Nazis in Ukraine actively involved in combat right now. The Russian Neo Nazi PMC Wagner, good thing Russia is so bad at war though, a lot of these Neo Nazis have been thoroughly denazified.
I’m sorry but I find it hard to believe that the country that is
raping and torturing adults and children in Ukraine and committing genocide against the Ukrainian people are the “good guys”.
> Russia is just as democratic if not more so than Ukraine.
Russia has had one leader for the past 30 years, in that time Ukraine managed to oust out a large amount of the Soviet Era corruption that present day Russia forced upon them.
Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia is the aggressor, and to be honest not only am I not engaging with you, I think this is fully bad faith. Russia is the one currently making existential, nuclear threats, too. In fact, reading responses like yours makes me hate Russia's actions even more - they've created so much propaganda that you can honestly write that somehow it's actually Ukraine's fault that they got attacked and invaded by Russia.
Fun fact: the only time when far right had any power in Ukrainian parliament was during pro-russian president. After he fled to Russia they've never been able to cross electoral threshold. They currently hold one (!) seat in the parliament.
That's all you need to know about Nazis in Ukraine.
Not really. Look at the big picture. Due to Ukrainian corruption over the past 30 years the transition from communism to democracy was botched, even worse than it was in Russia post-Yeltsin.
Economic failure secondary to corruption resulted in unhappy people. Naturally people fell back into ethno-nationalist populism and violence and politicians promised pot of gold at the end of the rainbow solutions like EU or NATO membership to deflect attention from their domestic failures.
Putin has been quite clear that this is full blood and soil, Ukrainian identity doesn't exist and all of Ukraine is actually Russia. They do not care about Ukrainian corruption in the slightest.
The deal for EU membership was tied to a poison apple of requirements from IMF + EU loans that demanded sweeping austerity.
the pre-Euromaidan politicians decided to take the loan offered from Russia that did not require the austerity cuts to social services, pensions, and selling off public infrastructure.
Euromaidan violence followed and after the coup everything continued to escalate and collapse into the Ukrainian "civil war"
much of the eastern Ukrainian population was dehumanized after euromaidan. language laws passed, large opposition parties were made illegal. violent ultranationalists like azov begin gaining power.
Ukrainian civilians have been abused and victimized by corruption for many years, decades.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Plenty of politics stories do get posted and discussed as on-topic, even if they are the minority. I mean, "Russian forces invade Ukraine after Putin orders attack" was a huge thread on here... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30450336
These guidelines are deliberately broad and allow for many exceptions wrt politics.
But in truth it's more like a suburb. The distance from Bucha's rail station to the Office of the President of Ukraine is about the same as San Francisco to Millbrae.
It puts into perspective how fraught the early days of the invasion were, and the true weight of Zelensky holding his ground in Kyiv.